The medieval mind did not conceive of power in the abstract, as we might today. Power was tangible, rooted in the soil. It was measured in hides and carucates, in knights’ fees and feudal dues, in the allegiance of men who lived upon the land. Consequently, when a great noble house faded from the pages of history, it was rarely a sudden extinction. It was not a disappearance, but a transformation. Like a great river reaching the sea, its identity did not vanish but was absorbed into a larger body, its currents continuing to shape the tides of fortune under new names and new titles. This is the story of the evolution of power, a process of absorption, integration, and perpetual change, seen through the lens of a small but resilient corner of England: the Barony of Brattleby in the county of Lincoln.
The Norman Settlement and the Gift of Power
Our story begins, as so much of English history does, with the shattering force of 1066. The Norman Conquest was not merely a change of king; it was a revolution in land ownership. King William I, the Conqueror, asserted that all land in England was his by right of conquest, to grant and to reclaim as he saw fit. Across the kingdom, the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish thegnhood was systematically dismantled and replaced by a new aristocracy of French-speaking warriors. In Lincolnshire, a region with a proud and independent Danelaw heritage, this process was particularly stark.
Among the greatest of the new tenants-in-chief was William Malet. Of Norman and possibly English maternal descent, Malet was a trusted companion of the Conqueror, famously charged with burying the body of the vanquished King Harold Godwinson after the Battle of Hastings. For his loyalty and martial prowess, he was rewarded on a colossal scale. While his primary seat was the Honour of Eye in Suffolk, his holdings stretched across nine counties. In Lincolnshire, the Domesday Book of 1086 records Malet as the tenant-in-chief of a vast swathe of territory. Under the entry for the Lawress Wapentake, we find the manor of Brattleby, referred to as ‘Bratelbie’:
*‘In Bratelbie, Merlesuen had 7 carucates of land taxable. Land for 7 ploughs. Robert [Malet] has 1 plough in lordship; and 20 sokemen on 4 carucates of this land and 13 villeins with 6 ploughs. There is a church there, and 1 mill rendering 2 shillings, and 100 acres of meadow. TRE worth £8; now £6.’*
This dry, administrative entry is a window into a world of profound upheaval. ‘Merlesuen’ refers to Mærle-Sveinn, a powerful Anglo-Danish thegn who held these lands ‘in the time of King Edward’ (TRE). By 1086, he was gone, his authority extinguished, his lands now part of the vast portfolio of the Malet family, held by William’s son, Robert. The value of the manor had fallen, a common feature in Domesday entries, reflecting the disruption and violence of the Conquest years, including William’s punitive ‘Harrying of the North’ (1069-70), a campaign in which William Malet himself participated and was briefly captured at York.
The Malet ascendancy, however, demonstrates the inherent fragility of this newly granted power. Robert Malet, who succeeded his father, became one of the wealthiest magnates in England, serving as Lord Great Chamberlain under King Henry I. Yet, his fortunes turned dramatically. Siding with Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, against his brother Henry I, Malet was on the losing side of the Battle of Tinchebray in 1106. The price of his disloyalty was absolute: he was disinherited and exiled, his vast estates, including the overlordship of Brattleby, forfeited to the Crown. The first great family to hold the barony had not died out; it had been politically erased. The king giveth, and the king taketh away.
Anarchy, Law, and the Great Charter
The fall of the Malets plunged their former lands into a complex web of new ownership. The Honour of Eye was granted for a time to King Henry I’s nephew, Stephen of Blois. When Stephen seized the throne in 1135, ushering in the nineteen-year civil war known as ‘The Anarchy’, the control of lands and loyalties across England became fluid and violently contested. For a mesne tenant—the local knight actually holding the manor of Brattleby from the great overlord—this was a perilous time. He would have been expected to provide military service, but choosing which side to support—that of King Stephen or his cousin, the Empress Matilda—was a gamble that could end in ruin.
Lincolnshire was at the very heart of this conflict. The first Battle of Lincoln in 1141 saw King Stephen captured after a disastrous defeat, a moment that nearly cost him his crown. The local gentry, including the tenants of Brattleby, would have been caught between the powerful conflicting loyalties of Ranulf de Gernon, Earl of Chester (for Matilda), and the Beaumont faction (for Stephen). Their lands were ravaged by siege and skirmish, their rents unpaid, their allegiance demanded by armed forces from both sides.
Out of this chaos grew a powerful impulse among the baronage to codify and limit the arbitrary power of the king. A generation later, this sentiment would crystallize during the disastrous reign of King John. By the early 13th century, the overlordship of the fee that included Brattleby had passed through several hands, but the principle remained the same: the king’s demands for scutage (money paid in lieu of military service) and other feudal incidents had become extortionate.
When the barons rose against John in 1215, Lincolnshire was once again a hotbed of rebellion. Among the twenty-five sureties appointed to enforce Magna Carta were several magnates with significant interests in the county, such as William de Forz, Gilbert de Gant, and Robert de Ros. While the lord of Brattleby was too minor a figure to be named in the charter, he was precisely the kind of man whose rights it sought to protect. Clauses 2 and 3, which fixed the rates of feudal relief, and Clause 61, which established the security committee, were of direct consequence to every landholder in the realm. The magnificent copy of the 1215 Magna Carta, still preserved at Lincoln Cathedral, is a testament to the county’s central role in this foundational struggle.
The struggle did not end with John’s signature. Upon his death in 1216, the rebel barons, allied with Prince Louis of France, controlled much of England. The future of the Plantagenet dynasty rested on the nine-year-old King Henry III and his regent, the legendary William Marshal. The decisive moment came on 20 May 1217, at the Second Battle of Lincoln. In a brutal street battle, Marshal’s royalist forces stormed the city, routing the French and baronial army. The battle, wryly nicknamed the ‘Lincoln Fair’ by the victorious soldiers for the amount of loot they acquired, secured the English throne for Henry III and ended the immediate threat of a French takeover. The lord of Brattleby, looking out from his manor just six miles north of the city, would have seen the smoke and heard the echoes of a battle that determined the fate of his king, his country, and his property for generations to come.
The Long Fourteenth Century and the Rise of the Gentry
The centuries that followed were marked by a gradual shift in the nature of power. The old feudal host, summoned for forty days’ service, was slowly replaced by a system of paid, professional armies, with nobles serving the king on the basis of indentured contracts. Land was still the foundation of wealth, but its power was increasingly expressed through royal service, administrative office, and legal acumen.
During this period, the manor of Brattleby passed to families like the Thorntons, prominent local gentry who represented a class on the rise. They were not great magnates commanding vast honours, but knights and squires who derived their influence from their local landholdings and their service to the Crown as sheriffs, escheators, and Members of Parliament. Their power was woven into the fabric of county society. The Black Death of 1348-49, which killed at least a third of England’s population, profoundly altered the landscape. With labour scarce, peasants and craftsmen could demand higher wages and greater freedoms, while landlords had to adapt to a new economic reality. Wealthy gentry families who managed their estates effectively could consolidate and expand their holdings.
It was during this period of social and political flux, leading towards our focal point of 1400, that a family rose to prominence in north Lincolnshire whose fate would become inextricably linked with the seismic political struggles of the next century: the Hansards of South Kelsey, a village not far from Brattleby. The Hansards were a well-established gentry family, holding their lands for generations and serving in local government. Their identity, however, would be defined not by quiet administration but by their fierce and ultimately ruinous loyalty to the House of Lancaster.
A House Divided: The Wars of the Roses and the Lincolnshire Stage
By the mid-15th century, the English nobility had become dangerously factionalised. The weak and ineffectual rule of the Lancastrian King Henry VI allowed for the rise of ‘over-mighty subjects,’ magnates like Richard, Duke of York, whose private armies and competing claims to power eventually tore the kingdom apart in the conflict known as the Wars of the Roses (c. 1455-1487).
Lincolnshire was staunchly, though not uniformly, Lancastrian territory. The Hansard family patriarch, Richard Hansard, Esquire, was a devoted adherent to the cause of Henry VI and his formidable queen, Margaret of Anjou. When the dynastic war erupted in earnest, Hansard and his kinsmen answered the call. The climax of the first phase of the war came on Palm Sunday, 29 March 1461, at the Battle of Towton in Yorkshire. In a blinding snowstorm, the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil took place. The Lancastrian army was annihilated, and the victorious Yorkist claimant was crowned King Edward IV.
For the vanquished, the consequences were swift and brutal. Richard Hansard was among those captured after the battle and was executed. But for the Yorkist regime, his death was not enough. In November 1461, Edward IV’s first Parliament passed a sweeping Act of Attainder. This legal instrument declared a list of prominent Lancastrians to be traitors, posthumously or in absentia. The effect was to declare them ‘corrupt in blood,’ meaning they were stripped of all titles, lands, and possessions, and their heirs were legally barred from inheriting. The name Richard Hansard appears explicitly in the Rolls of Parliament for this Act.
This was the mechanism by which a noble line could be made to ‘disappear.’ The Hansard family’s power, built over centuries, was dissolved with the stroke of a pen. Their manors, including South Kelsey, were forfeited to the Crown and then redistributed to loyal Yorkist supporters. The family’s identity was, in a legal sense, extinguished.
Yet the tides of war were far from settled. A decade later, Lincolnshire was again at the centre of a major insurrection against Edward IV, known as the Welles Uprising. In 1470, a local dispute instigated by Sir Robert Welles, a volatile Lancastrian sympathiser, escalated into a full-blown rebellion. King Edward marched north with terrifying speed to crush the revolt. The two armies met near Stamford on 12 March 1470, at a battle that has gone down in history as the Battle of Losecoat Field. The name is believed to derive from the rebel soldiers casting off their liveried coats (identifying them as retainers of the Duke of Clarence and the Earl of Warwick) to flee the field more quickly in the face of the royal army’s cannonade. The rebellion was crushed, its leaders executed, and Yorkist authority in Lincolnshire brutally reasserted. For any surviving Hansard sympathisers, it was another devastating blow.
Transformation and Integration: The Tudor Dawn
The final, decisive turn of the wheel came at the Battle of Bosworth on 22 August 1485. The death of the last Yorkist king, Richard III, and the victory of the Lancastrian claimant, Henry Tudor, ushered in a new dynasty and a new political order. King Henry VII’s primary objective was to end the dynastic strife and secure his throne. A key part of his strategy was reconciliation, which often involved the systematic reversal of the Acts of Attainder passed during the wars.
For families like the Hansards, this offered a path to restoration. Many Lancastrian families who had lost everything in 1461 had their attainders reversed and their lands returned under Henry VII, provided they demonstrated unwavering loyalty to the new Tudor regime. This was not a return to the past, but an integration into a new structure of power. Henry VII was notoriously suspicious of the old, powerful nobility who had caused the recent wars. He controlled them through a system of financial bonds and recognisances, ensuring their obedience through the threat of financial ruin.
Power was being redefined. The ideal nobleman was no longer the semi-independent feudal magnate in his castle, but the loyal courtier at Westminster or the diligent Justice of the Peace administering the king’s law in his county. The manor of Brattleby itself passed into the hands of the Tyrwhitt family, another prominent Lincolnshire line who successfully navigated the transition into the Tudor era. Sir Robert Tyrwhitt served as a Master of the Horse to King Henry VIII, a position of great influence at the heart of the royal court. The Tyrwhitts, and later the Monson family who acquired Brattleby in the post-medieval period, exemplified this new model of gentry power: derived from land, but exercised through royal service, law, and administration. The Hansard name, though diminished, survived, absorbed into the broader gentry class, its dramatic Lancastrian past a memory that underscored the perils of rebellion.
The story of Brattleby and the families connected to it—Malet, Thornton, Hansard, Tyrwhitt—is a microcosm of the evolution of power in England. It demonstrates that noble lines were not fragile things that simply broke and vanished. They were resilient, adaptable strands in a vast and complex tapestry. Power could be lost on the battlefield, forfeited by attainder, or seized by a new king. But the land remained. And as long as the land remained, the potential for power endured, ready to be inherited by a daughter, regranted by a king, or reclaimed by a pardoned heir. It was a current that could be diverted but never stopped, an endless chain linking the Norman Conquest to the Tudor state, whose echoes are still visible in the fields, churches, and records of a Lincolnshire barony.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. (2003). Penguin Classics. (The entry for Lincolnshire, Lawress Wapentake, provides the details for Brattleby/‘Bratelbie’). The Great Domesday Book: Lincolnshire, Folio 353r, held at The National Archives, Kew. Rolls of Parliament, Vol. V, (Rot. Parl. 1 Edw. IV, m. 18) for the 1461 Act of Attainder against Richard Hansard and other Lancastrians. Magna Carta (1215). The text and context are widely available, with the Lincoln Cathedral copy being particularly relevant.
Secondary Sources:
Barlow, Frank. (1999). The Feudal Kingdom of England, 1042-1216. 5th ed. Longman. Carpenter, David. (2004). The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066-1284. Penguin. Castor, Helen. (2011). She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth. Faber & Faber. (Provides excellent context on the Anarchy). Goodman, Anthony. (1992). The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452-97. Routledge. Gunn, S.J. (2007). 'The Accession of Henry VII'. History Review, 58, pp. 2-7. Hicks, Michael. (2010). The Wars of the Roses. Yale University Press. Jones, Dan. (2012). The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England. Viking. Morris, Marc. (2005). The Norman Conquest. Windmill Books. Page, William (ed.). (1906). The Victoria History of the County of Lincoln, Vol. 2. Archibald Constable & Co. (While comprehensive coverage for Lincolnshire is incomplete compared to other counties, this volume and local historical society publications provide context on landholding patterns). Pollard, A.J. (2000). The Wars of the Roses. 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan. Swarby, D.N. (1993). The 'Lords' and Lordship of the Lincolnshire Rebellion of 1470*. University of York, Borthwick Paper No. 84.